5TA THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
numerousin New York, * throughout the Ohio Valley,t and the States 
still further to the south,¢ whilst in the West they are known to have 
been erected, within the present generation, by “tribes living in the 
Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas.”§ In point of size there is 
a wide difference among them. <A large majority consists of not more 
than “two or three cart-loads of stone,” though Squier speaks of one 
situated near the Indian trail that led from the Shawnee village at 
Chillicothe to the mouth of the Scioto River as being rectangular in 
shape, and originally quite symmetrical in outline, and measuring 106 
feet long by 60 broad, and from 3 to 4 feet high.|| Where intended 
as memorials of the dead they are sometimes plied up over a single 
corpse, or they may serve to mark the site of one or more of those 
general interments, when the dead of an entire village or a clan, for a 
number of years, were collected together and buried in one common 
erave.{] This latter form of burial was not confined to any one family 
or stock of tribes, but seems to have been common to all, and was 
always attended with great ceremony. 
The Jesuit Fathers Breboeuf** and Lallemant tt give us very full and 
*A pile of stones. - - - Indian tradition says that a Mohawk murdered a 
brother (or two of them) on the spot, and that this tumulus was erected to com- 
memorate the event. - - - They all cast a stone upon the pile:” Howe, Histori- 
cal Collections of New York, p. 278: New York, 1842. 
t Archwologia Americana, vol. 1, pp. 131-184. Anc. Mon. of the Mississippi Valley, 
p. 184. See also a note to p. 362, vol. 11, Reports of the Peabody Museum: Cam- 
bridge, 1880. 
t‘*Seven heaps of stones being monuments of seven Indians slain by the Sinne- 
gars:” Lawson, Carolina, p. 44. See also Jefferson, Votes on Virginia, p. 191, and 
Jones, Antiquities of the Southern Indians, p. 127, for an account of such cairns in 
Virginia and Georgia. 
§ Yarrow, Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians, p. 48: Washington, 
1880. ‘See also United States Geographical Surveys, west of the 100th meridian, vol. 
vu, pp. 392 and 394. One of these cairns was 25 feet long, 20 broad, and 10 feet high, 
and covered the body of a warrior called by the Mormons Nabbynunck. See also 
Reconnoissance of Northwestern Wyoming, by Capt. Jones, U. 8. Army, p. 276, 
where we are told that among the Shoshones ‘the dead are usually buried in shal- 
low graves and covered with a low mound of loose stones.” 
|| Ane. Mon. Miss. Valley, p. 184. 
q Col. C. W. Jenckes, superintendent of the Corundum mines in western North 
Carolina, says: ‘ We have Indians all about us with traditions extending back for 
five hundred years. In this time they have buried their dead under huge piles of 
stones. We have at one point the remains of 600 warriors under one pile:” Foster, 
Prehistoric Races, p. 149: Chicago, 1873. As the Cherokees had held the region 
where this cairn was situated from time immemorial, this was probably one of their 
graves. That they did bury their dead in this fashion may be inferred from astate- 
ment of Adair, who tells us, in a note to p. 185, that ‘‘ the Cheerake do not now col- 
lect the bones of their dead, yet they continue to raise and multiply heaps of stones 
as monuments of their dead.” See also Ane. Mon. of the Miss. Valley, p. 184, for an 
account of a similar interment in Pickaway County, Ohio. 
** Relation en Vannée 1636, chap. viii and ix: Quebec, 1858. 
tt Relation, A. D. 1642, pp. 94 et seq. 
